Institute

Founded in 1994, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin is one of the more than 80 research institutes administered by the Max Planck Society. It is dedicated to the study of the history of science and aims to understand scientific thinking and practice as historical phenomena.

People

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science comprises scholars across all Departments and Research Groups, as well as an Administration team, IT Support, Research IT Group, and Research Coordination and Communications team.

Publications & Resources

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) engages with the research community and broader public, and is committed to open access.

This section provides access to published research results and electronic sources in the history of science. It is also a platform for sharing ongoing research projects that develop digital tools.

Researchers at the Institute benefit from an internal library service. The Institute’s research is also made accessible to the wider public through edited Feature Stories and the Mediathek’s audio and video content.

News & Events

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science frequently shares news, including calls for papers and career opportunities. The Media & Press section highlights press releases and the Institute's appearances in national and global media. Public events—including colloquia, seminars, and workshops—are shown on the events overview.

Catalogues & Resources

The library has an extensive collection of literature relevant to the history of science and other research fields handled at the Institute. Its collection is constantly expanding, and includes current research literature as well as a collection of rara from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The printed inventory also includes a collection of estates, mainly documents of physicists from the first half of the twentieth century. Our collections are searchable through the library catalog.

List

Library Catalogue

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science's Library Catalogue is the starting point for searching our collections of books, journals, newspapers, microforms, and selected online resources. Please remember that books may not be taken outside of the Institute.

Magazines, Newspapers, & E-Journals

Printed and electronic magazine and newspaper titles available in German and Austrian libraries are here

Exclusively electronic journal titles accessible at the MPIWG or in other German libraries can be found here

We have also launched the BrowZine app to enable you to manage your academic journals—find out more in the BrowZine section below.

Max Planck Society eBooks Collection

The Max Planck Society (MPG) provides access to 650,000 titles from different publishers or eBook providers. The content is regularly updated. eBooks available within the Max Planck Society are accessible through the online eBooks catalogue.

BrowZine

We recently launched the BrowZine app to enable you to manage your academic journals, by collecting your favorite journals on a "shelf“ of your own.

Access BrowZine using your browser on the BrowZine website or download the app onto your mobile device (via the App Store or Google Play). Here you can browse complete journal issues by subject, easily review tables of contents, and save and download full articles. BrowZine also offer an FAQs page.

In the mobile app, you can create and add journals to your own bookshelf, and be notified when new articles are published. You can also save and export articles to services such as DropBox, Mendeley, RefWorks, Zotero, Papers and more. Use the durable linking capability to easily link to specific “shelves” within BrowZine.

You can access your journals while you are at the Institute, or by using an Institute VPN when you are elsewhere.

ECHO & Digital Resources

A research-driven program has worked to present high-quality digital versions of sources from the library and many other collections, resulting in an open digital research library ECHO—Cultural Heritage Online of some 200,000 items available to a wider scholarly community online. The Institute is also engaged in Research IT activities, with a range of databases available for use on the Digital Resources page.

Rare Books & Archival Collections

In addition to its printed and online resources, the library holds collections of archival materials (approx. 10,000 items), which include autographs by Albert Einstein and his wife Elsa, papers and the newspaper clipping collection of anti-relativist Ernst Gehrcke, and correspondence of the German physicist Emil Rupp.

The library's growing rare book collection (approx. 2,500 volumes) comprises books ranging from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth century and journals (Acta eruditorum, Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Sciences), encyclopedias (Encyclopédie méthodique), and nineteenth/twentieth-century lecture notes. A growing number of rare books is being digitized and is accessible through the Library Catalogue and ECHO (Cultural Heritage Online). Since the rare book collection is in an air-conditioned vault, you must contact the library to access them.

Recommended Databases

These reference databases are licensed by the Institute's Library and/or Max Planck Digital Library of the MPG. The list of databases available to the Institute can be found on the DBIS—Datenbank-Infosystem.